D&D 4E What do you like about 4e healing?

[Li Shenron]

5. Non-magical hit point recovery: Non-magical means of hit point recovery exist, and are about on par with magical healing.

This is the only aspect I like, provided the second half of the sentence is ignored because I don't like that at all.

Also, I don't exactly like point 2. (the soft cap) but I'd be willing to give it a try.

I dislike all other points.

 

[Dragonblade]

I voted for all of them! I like it all!

 

[Gamer McSmartypants]

...

 

[pemerton]

If there are any aspects that you think I've missed, please detail them in a separate post.

There are two things I like that I think are missing from your options.

I like the fact that the mechanics are based coherently around a "hp as morale/resolve" approach, rather than a "hp as meat" approach. This makes room in the game for things like fear attacks causing psychic damage, which I like a lot, and also for non-magical "healing", which I also like a lot. It reinforces, for me at least, the "gonzo rather than gritty" feel of D&D combat.

The other thing I like is that 4e healing separates, to a significant extent, hit point reserves from combat endurance. This is different from other versions of D&D. What I mean is that a PC can have very deep hit point reserves (lots of surges, for example, from class, CON, feats etc) but this on its own is not equivalent to combat endurance, because the PC needs to be able to access those surges in the course of resolving combat (via second wind, own powers, others' powers, etc). This creates an extra dynamic in combat which adds to both mechanical depth (PC build decisions), tactical death (the party's management of the action economy and individual players' decisions about how to deploy their PC's powers), and dramatic depth (as PCs who are on the ropes dig deep and find the capacity to keep on going).

 

[SteveC]

All of the above! It's almost as if people don't remember the pre 4E days with all the complaints about healing. But we seem to be in luck! The new edition seems likely to bring back those complaints again!

Why does it take my high level character soooo long to recover hit points?

Why does my cure spell heal the mage much better than the fighter?

Why do I have to play the cleric, AGAIN? And why do I have to spend all my actions healing people instead of doing something fun?

Oh, I'm out of heals, we're camping for the day!

Those were just the ones I remember off the top of my head, but it looks like they're coming back...

Please let it not be so!

 

[FireLance]

This is the only aspect I like, provided the second half of the sentence is ignored because I don't like that at all.

Actually, the second part is important, because the greater the gap between non-magical and magical healing, the greater the incentive for a typical party to include a magical rather than a non-magical healer type character.

That said, perhaps one way to address this issue is to have non-magical healing less effective, but for the healer character to reduce the need for healing in the first place through pre-emptively granting temporary hit points, or raising defences so that characters lose fewer hit points in the first place?

 

[FireLance]

I'd like to go for the positive framing, but I couldn't find anything here that I could support either. There doesn't seem to be a poll option for us.

Presumably, this means you don't really like any of the distinctive characteristics of 4e healing, then?

 

[Ahnehnois]

Presumably, this means you don't really like any of the distinctive characteristics of 4e healing, then?

Assuming those characteristics are all on the list, then yes.

 

[Hassassin]

Assuming those characteristics are all on the list, then yes.

Out of curiosity, what's wrong with number 1?

 

[Ahnehnois]

Out of curiosity, what's wrong with number 1?

Healing scales with base hit points. That's not as problematic as some of the other ones, but I do have some issues with it. If take it to the extreme, you have an effect that simply restores someone to full health, that can be quite unbalancing (the Heal spell used to do this in 2e and 3e, but was revised for 3.5). The converse is the old Harm spell, which was also rather unbalancing.

I'm also not a big fan of math. Scaling healing with hp presumably forces one to calculate fractions if you're not healing all of your damage at once (honestly I don't know 4e mechanics to that level of detail so I don't know if that's the case but it seems like it would be). Sometimes that's necessary, but I'd like that kept to a minimum.

The last thing is that I think it's important that magical healing reflect the power of the caster, not the target.

I don't see at as being a huge conceptual dealbreaker, but I'm fine with CLW being 1d8+CL and so on.